By Night’s End opens with an external wide shot of a suburban, single-storey home at night. A ‘For Sale’ sign in the yard is briefly illuminated in red and blue by a passing patrol car, and then a man approaches from the foreground and enters the house. Shortly afterwards we see him again, half-jogging half-limping…
“Maybe just a worthless novelty, but maybe the key to the universe,” says Professor von Scheisenberg (French Stewart), some way into Richard Elfman’s Aliens, Clowns & Geeks. Scheisenberg is describing the phallic obelisk which protagonist Eddie Pine (Elfman’s son Bodhi) has just brought into his laboratory to be identified. This alien object, which uses Eddie’s…